Kubota Gardens

You've made it!  The last and final Seattle/Olympic recap post!  Feel proud of yourself that you've made it and stuck with me through all my endless posting...hello?  Is anyone still there?!

Anyway, for our last stop in Seattle we headed to the Kubota Garden, just a couple exits away from the airport.  Kubota is, yet again, a free garden in Seattle that's open to the public and blends Japanese concepts with a variety of Pacific Northwest plants.  This place is huge.  I think we only saw about a third of it.  There are main paths that lead to different areas of the garden and then there are a ton a little paths you can take that will take you...well, it's usually a mystery where you'll end up, but that's half the fun.  Again, it's dog friendly and a great spot for a picnic or just a relaxing stroll over little bridges and through endless bushes of rhododendron.  We had a great time walking around and exploring, even if it was a little difficult to find the entrance/exit at the end.

Everything is a bit overgrown, but in a charming and approachable way. 

Rhododendron everywhere you turn.

I love these, whatever they are?

A crazy little bridge over a pond.

We had a great time at Kubota Garden, walking around and taking random little paths to wherever they would lead us.  It's a great spot to kill time before a flight, or if you want a relaxing place to walk around that's a little outside the city, this is it.

So, that's it.  The last of the Seattle/Olympic National Park posts.  We had such a great time and it was a wonderful mix of nature and city.  I wouldn't have changed a thing about it.  Our favorite Olympic NP things was definitely Lake Crescent and our favorite Seattle thing was probably the market tour and all the delicious food we got to eat.  I can't wait to return someday and see a bunch of awesome stuff that we missed on this trip!  Oh, and eat lots of delicious seafood bisque!  Mmm.  

I hope you've enjoyed my horrendously drawn-out recap of our trip and I didn't bore you with too many pictures of flowers.  And no worries, you won't have to put up with another trip recap until October when we head to Texas.  Until then, lots of summer-time local Cincinnati/Ohio goodness.

Volunteer Park and Conservatory

Luckily, on our last day in Seattle our flight back to Cincinnati (via Atlanta) didn't leave until 11pm, so we had plenty of time to go out and explore the city.  We spent the morning eating delicious white chocolate macadamia nut ginger scones from Dahlia Bakery (YUM!) and leisurely packing.  Then we hit up Brave Horse Tavern for lunch (quite tasty!) before making our way up to Volunteer Park.

Volunteer Park is just one of many great Seattle parks that are free!  And dog friendly.  It's home to the Asian Art Museum, a floral conservatory and a water tower.  Plus there's green spaces to have picnics and gatherings, flowers everywhere and even a couple koi ponds.  What's not to like?

I noticed tons of poppies in Seattle, which you don't see much in Ohio.

We decided to hike up the steps of the water tower since we had so much time before our flight, and we were glad we did.

The view from the water tower was pretty great.  You could see downtown and puget sound, as well as some more residential areas.

Going down the steps of the water tower.

Our main reason for going to Volunteer Park was to check out the conservatory.  Floral conservatories are usually one of the things we enjoy visiting when we travel to a new city.  Surprise, surprise.

Overall the conservatory was pretty small, but they had a great selection of orchids and cacti.  As well as a spring room filled with lilies and hydrangea that smelled heavenly.

Not sure what type of flower this is, but it's pretty isn't it?! 

For $4 per person the Volunteer Park Conservatory was definitely worth it and the park itself seems like a great spot to hang out and relax under a tree with a little picnic.  

Stay tuned tomorrow because it's the last and final Seattle post!  I swear.  You've nearly made it, after two and a half weeks of nonstop posts.  So don't miss it!

Pike Place Market

Hope you all had a wonderful weekend!  Now, back to this Seattle recap madness...

Antoine and I woke up bright and early on the day of our anniversary, with a long list of things on the itinerary.  We exchanged cards/gifts, gushed and even cried a little.  Then we got our butts in gear, got ready and headed toward Pike Place Market.  You may remember the how much we loved the Edible Canada tour of the Vancouver's Granville Market.  It, surprisingly enough, turned out to be our favorite part of that trip!  So, when we were researching things to do in Seattle, Pike Place Market was a definite must.  So when we saw that Savor Seattle offered at tour of the market, we knew we had to try it and see how it compared.

A couple things to note about the tour, it's kind of pricey.  But, if you're a foodie who likes learning about the history of a place and getting a behind the scenes tasting tour of some of the best spots in the market then you'll realize that it's totally worth the price tag.  Plus, with the Savor Seattle tour you get a little VIP card that gives you discounts on at all of their affiliated vendors, and that includes restaurants throughout the city.  This ended up being a great little tool for us and guided us on what restaurants to check out while we were in Seattle and saved us probably $15 in the market and around the city.  Plus, our tour guide Nick gave us incredible suggestions on places to check out and there wasn't a place that we tried that disappointed us.  They know their stuff at Savor Seattle...just check the reviews on Yelp!

The tour met up in the theater that happens to be at the gum wall.  Antoine and I were early for the tour so naturally we brought some gum and contributed to the wall.  The original gum wall is actually pretty full so the gum has migrated to the other side of the alley.  That's where we put our gum, directly on a sign that said not to put your gum here...oops!

It was our anniversary, so we obviously made a heart out of our two pieces of gum! 

The tour took us around the market tasting a variety of goodies from chai tea to three different kinds of smoked salmon.   From chowder to dried and chocolate covered cherries.  It was a lot of delicious samples and suprisingly, I liked all of it.  There wasn't one sample, out of easy twenty, that I didn't like.  Savor Seattle is very conscious of food allergies and when you book your tour they ask for a list of allergies and dislikes.  And then, day of, our guide Nick made sure everyone got to try something at almost every vendor.  So the lady who didn't eat fish, got a vegan chowder and a chicken chili at Pike Place Chowder.  It was nice and very accommodating.  (And she seemed really pleased with both samples!)

I will also say that Nick was awesome about people who were taking pictures.  He'd stop and pause while he was handing out samples so the photographers in the group could get a good shot.

Our tour guide, Nick, at Beecher's Cheese.

Oh, and also...Nick was a kickass tour guide.  Have I mentioned that already?!  Like I said, he recommended places to eat inside and outside the market to try.  Sometimes even very specific dishes, like the peanut butter cookies at Dahlia Bakery.  He gave us a historical background of the market that was entertaining and informative.  And he told the corniest jokes, which I loved!  I was actually quoting things he'd said after the tour...particularly the one when he referred to himself as a cute baby triceritops (with a plate of food samples) that we had to surrounded and protect from the evil, T-rex-like onlookers who might try to get at our tasty sample with their little T-rex arms.  Love it!  He referred to it as the Costco complex...people flock to seemingly free samples and hone in.  Hence the surround-and-protect-your-tour-guide maneuver.

While it wasn't just the two of us on the tour (like Vancouver, in the off season), Nick referenced each of the 11 or so people on the tour by their first names and somehow gave us each some one-on-one attention.  Oh, and you could tell he actually loved the food we were all sampling.  It was so obvious but made all the difference.  If you take the tour and get Nick as your tour guide consider yourself lucky!

A view of the market from the other end.

 That is food porn, people.  Take it in and be sad you can't eat it.

There were a couple of things that we sampled on the tour that we absolutely loved and had to get more of...like Beecher's Cheese and smoked salmon which we took back home as gifts (as well as some for ourselves).  But when it came to deciding what to have for lunch in the market, the decision was so easy...soup from Pike Place Chowder.  Before our tour I had never tried a clam chowder I liked, but then I tasted this.  And surprisingly enough, my favorite (even over the tasty chowder) was the seafood bisque.  If someone would have said "Jessica, you are going to love the seafood bisque at Pike Place Chowder!  It is going to be like magic on your tongue and you are going to crave it once you get home!!", I would have laughed in that person's face.  But, it's true.  That stuff was like a magical unicorn baby that shot rainbows out of it's horn.  And when Antoine and I sat down for lunch, he in front of clam chowder and me in front of my bisque, I swear we didn't say anything for a couple minutes.  We were lost in a wonderland of rich, creamy broth and the freshest seafood imaginable.  If I lived in Seattle I would get this once a week, no joke.

Oh, and no Pike Place Market tour would be complete without a demonstration of the famous fish throwing!  Lucky for me, I was front and center with my camera ready.  So I decided to make my first ever GIF, since the photos were really just begging for it...

I'm pretty happy with how the GIF turned out.  Even happier that I didn't actually get hit in the face by a fish!  But all in all, the market tour was a blast and I'd highly recommend it to anyone, especially if they've never been to the market before.  The food, guides and history lesson are all top notch.

Have you been to Pike Place Market?  What was your favorite part?

Check out what we did after our tour and lunch at Pike Place Market here and here.


*Savor Seattle did not ask me to write this post, nor did they compensate me.  It was just a fantastic tour that I wanted to share with you all.

Onward to Seattle

Happy Friday people!  Did anyone else feel like this week took twice as long as a normal week?  What's up with that?!  Half way through I actually forgot what day it was; neeedless to say, I'm pretty stoked it finally Friday!  Well, guess what I have for you...yet another Olympic/Seattle post.  Enjoy!

After we woke up at Lake Crescent rested and rejuvenated (with only the teeniest hangover) and went on our wonderful little hike to Marymere Falls we packed up our things and hopped in the car.  We continued down the 101, the highway that loops around the park and stopped in Port Angeles for a light lunch.  Then, we intended to make our way up to Hurricane Ridge for the spectacular view.  Sadly, the ridge was a bit foggy that day, but we decided to drive up as far as we could until the visibility was too low to see anything.  Just an heads up, if you intend to drive up to Hurricane Ridge make sure you stop at the visitor's center in Port Angeles (on your way to Hurricane Ridge)...they have a web cam that shows the HR visitor's center at the peak and you can get an idea of what the visibility is like at that moment.

It was sprinkling as we were going up, so there were lovely little droplets on everything.

Making our way up.  I'd say we got about half way up before we decided it was too foggy and headed back down the hill.

Still, the view of Port Angeles and the bay was gorgeous from where we were.

After our attempt at Hurricane Ridge we continued driving east toward Bainbridge Island, where we took the ferry over to Seattle.  I had never been on a ferry where you drive your car on board, so that was a cool experience for me.  And lucky for us, the rain had cleared about an hour or so before and we had a beautiful view of downtown Seattle as we crossed Puget Sound.

Before heading to the hotel we grabbed a couple bánh mì sandwiches in Chinatown at Saigon Vietnam Deli (Antoine was over the moon about these because they were very traditional and incredibly affordable).  After we checked into the hotel and basked in its awesomeness, we decided to take a little walk around downtown and grab a bubble tea at Bobachine.  We were pretty tired so we decided to turn in early in anticipation for all we had planned for our anniversary the following day.

Stay tuned next week for the last of the Seattle posts and hopefully a fun post about ventriloquist dummies...which will have absolutely nothing to do with Seattle, I promise. Have a great weekend everyone!

Seattle's Woodland Park Rose Garden

So, I underestimated just how many photos I took during our trip to Olympic and Seattle.  Not including iPhone photos and a couple film shots, my grand total adds up to 1,144 photos.  Ugh, I need to learn a little bit of self control.  Ha!  Who am I kidding?  That's not going to happen, unless I'm using film.  Oh, well.

While I'm still working my way through all the photos I took, the first batch I organized and edited were taken in the middle of our trip.  On our anniversary, after spending our morning running around Pike Place Market we drove a little north of downtown to the Woodland Park Rose Garden.  It's this great garden situated right next to the Seattle zoo and it's one of only a couple dozen certified American Rose Test Gardens in the US.  Oh, and it's free, with free nearby parking.  It doesn't get much better than that!

For me, our trip to the rose garden was like another anniversary present.  I've said before just how awesome Antoine is when it comes to me taking photos; he's patient and never rushes me.  Well, when we walked into the rose garden and my eyes got all wide and dilated and I went into my "pretty-flowers-must-take-pictures-of-every-single-one" mode...Antoine just continued to fuel the fire and pointed out roses that I had missed.  "Ooo, look at that one!"  "What about that one?"  "Look at the red one!"  "Did you see that one?"  It just made me smile and I had the best time wondering around, taking photos and smelling all the gorgeous roses.  They also have a little sensory garden in the back with a variety of herbs, flowers and plants, which was fun.  I'd highly recommend it to anyone.  And if I lived there I'd totally go in the afternoon with a little picnic and enjoy the beauty and tranquility of the garden with Antoine and Cheese (yeah, it's dog-friendly too!).